polurls / blue

the political blog aggregator for progressives

This weekend, a handful of Senate Republicans sketched out what they call a "plan" for fixing the mess conservatives might have created by getting the Supreme Court to gut Obamacare. It wasn't much in the way of an actual plan as two vague ideas, one of which was pretty much lifted from Obamacare. Well, now it's House Republicans'—led by their "ideal guy" Paul Ryan—turn to write an op-ed about their plan, and darned if it doesn't have some familiar elements.
We would allow parents to keep children on their plan until age 26. We would prohibit insurers from imposing lifetime limits on benefits. We would protect people with existing conditions. And we would guarantee renewability for people already enrolled in a plan.

Second, help people buy coverage. Right now, those who get insurance through their employer get a lot of help from the tax code ...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledges the 25th standing ovation he received during his speech to a joint meeting of Congress Tuesday.
In a 40-minute speech punctuated by 25 standing ovations and 41 applause breaks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned a joint session of Congress Tuesday that if the "bad deal" he claimed is being negotiated with Iran over its nuclear program is approved, the United States will leave itself vulnerable to a nuclear attack from Tehran a decade or so in the future. Of the deal, he said:
It doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb, it paves Iran’s path to the bomb."
Netanyahu said the choice is not between this "bad deal" and war, but between this and a better deal. Except, however, for a complete change in Iran's behavior as Netanyahu described it and a capitulation on all nuclear matters being negotiated ...

Retiring Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski
Potential candidates are constantly getting "mentioned" for higher office, but who's doing all that work? Why, the Great Mentioner of course. In this new ongoing series, Daily Kos channels the Great Mentioner and catalogs all the notable candidates who might run in 2016's most important races.

On Monday, five-term Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski announced that she would not run for re-election in 2016, setting off a wild race to succeed her. Maryland is a dark blue state especially in presidential years, going to Obama by a 62-36 margin, and most of the action is likely to be in the Democratic primary. However, while Old Line State Republicans know this will be a very tough contest, they're emboldened by Larry Hogan's surprise 2014 gubernatorial win and they'll be seeing if they can put this in play.

Here, John, let me show you how to work this thing.
When the House votes later today on a "clean" bill to fund Homeland Security through September 30, it will likely be under Rule XXII (or 22), which will basically allow the House to reverse course on its rejection last week of the Senate's "clean" bill.
Rule 22 is complicated, but it essentially stipulates that since the two chambers cannot get to a conference negotiation before DHS funding expires, the House reverses its position of disagreeing with the Senate’s legislation and concurs with it.
If John Boehner and crew have done their jobs, they will have lined up enough Republicans to vote with the 188 Democrats, almost all of whom are expected to vote for the "clean" funding bill that includes no anti-immigrant riders.

Make no mistake though, a successful vote today to fund DHS will be a ...

First thing Tuesday morning, House Speaker John Boehner folded like a cheap suit in agreeing to hold a vote on a clean Department of Homeland Security funding bill. Why would Boehner do this with entire days left before the short-term funding passed last Friday night expires? After all, until now, he'd been holding out to pacify the extremists in his caucus who want to hold DHS funding hostage to an attack on President Obama's immigration actions, and folding now means he'll face rage from the right.

Hmm ... what else was going on Tuesday morning?

That's right, Boehner caved just hours before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's highly politicized speech to Congress. The speech provided a massive distraction in the media—something some reporters, to their credit, noted. And Boehner can probably count on at least some of his far-right critics in the House being too ...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's politicized speech before a joint session of Congress today appears to be going from a mere insult to President Barack Obama and his administration to potential outright interference in this nation's foreign policy.
Washington (CNN)The Obama administration is bracing for Benjamin Netanyahu to spill secret details of Iran nuclear talks, as both camps traded last-minute political jabs ahead of the Israeli prime minister's controversial address to Congress Tuesday.

The White House is uncertain what precise details may come out but aides spent Monday frantically mobilizing after Israeli officials said that the prime minister planned to disclose sensitive details of an agreement taking shape in talks between six world powers and Iran, which has entered a delicate final stage.

Concern and anger among American officials about the nature of what Netanyahu might expose heightened already roiling tensions between ...

Last night, the New York Times reported that Hillary Clinton did not keep a government email account during her tenure at the State Department, relying solely on her personal email address. The Federal Records Act requires that governmental correspondence on personal email accounts be preserved; Clinton’s staff did not do so. Per the Times: It was only […]

On Thursday night, atheist blogger and American citizen Avijit Roy was brutally hacked to death in the street while returning home from a book fair in Dkaha, Bangladesh. Roy’s wife, Rafida Ahmed, was also injured. Roy was a prominent voice in the atheist blogosphere, having founded and moderated the popular Bangladeshi blog, Mukto-Mona (translated as “freethinkers”), which was nominated for […]

Wisconsin Governor and newly-ordained GOP frontrunner Scott Walker got under DC’s skin again yesterday when he compared union protesters to Islamic State militants. After a Conservative Political Action Conference audience member asked him how he would handle threats from Islamic extremists, Walker gave what was on track to be a standard response before, with the […]

There isn’t a lot of money in journalism these days. The Internet has forced the print editions of newspapers and magazines to either close down their shops or move online. And even when they do launch themselves into cyberspace, they find that people don’t want to pay for information that they can find on Twitter […]

Following reports that Illinois Republican Aaron Schock paid for private flights to and around his home district using taxpayer and campaign dollars, possibly in violation of House ethics rules, a new report from the Associated Press shows new spending by the Congressman on public and campaign accounts that has led our nation’s most Abercrombiefied member of Congress to […]

Obama is draping the banner of change over the NSA status quo. Bulk surveillance that caused such outrage will remain in place

In response to political scandal and public outrage, official Washington repeatedly uses the same well-worn tactic. It is the one that has been hauled out over decades in response to many of America's most significant political scandals. Predictably, it is the same one that shaped President Obama's much-heralded Friday speech to announce his proposals for "reforming" the National Security Agency in the wake of seven months of intense worldwide controversy.

The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are "serious questions that have been raised". They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite ...

Reporting the NSA story hasn't been easy, but it's always been fulfilling. It's what journalism at its crux is about, and we must protect that

As many of you know, I'm leaving the Guardian in order to work with Pierre Omidyar, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill and soon-to-be-identified others on building a new media organization. As I said when thisnews was reported a couple of weeks ago, leaving the Guardian was not an easy choice, but this was a dream opportunity that was impossible to decline.

We do not yet have an exact launch date for the new outlet, but rest assured: I'm not going to disappear for months or anything like that. The new site will be up and running reasonably soon.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Monday his government was likely to act to stop newspapers publishing what he called damaging ...

With General Alexander calling for NSA reporting to be halted, US and UK credibility as guardians of press freedom is crushed

The most under-discussed aspect of the NSA story has long been its international scope. That all changed this week as both Germany and France exploded with anger over new revelations about pervasive NSA surveillance on their population and democratically elected leaders.

As was true for Brazil previously, reports about surveillance aimed at leaders are receiving most of the media attention, but what really originally drove the story there were revelations that the NSA is bulk-spying on millions and millions of innocent citizens in all of those nations. The favorite cry of US government apologists -–everyone spies! – falls impotent in the face of this sort of ubiquitous, suspicionless spying that is the sole province of the US and its four English-speaking surveillance allies (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ...

'If MI5 warns that this is not in the public interest who am I to disbelieve them?', says the former editor of The Independent

Like many people, I've spent years writing and speaking about the lethal power-subservient pathologies plaguing establishment journalism in the west. But this morning, I feel a bit like all of that was wasted time and energy, because this new column by career British journalist Chris Blackhurst - an executive with and, until a few months ago, the editor of the UK daily calling itself "The Independent" - contains a headline that says everything that needs to be said about the sickly state of establishment journalism:

If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest, and might harm their operations, who am I (despite my grounding from Watergate onwards) to disbelieve them?"

Obama's anti-press measures 'are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration'

(updated below)

It's hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering process. Even the most Obama-friendly journals have warned of what they call "Obama's war on whistleblowers". James Goodale, the former general counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon administration, recently observed that "President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information" and added: "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom."

Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all ...

The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself.

Top-secret NSA documents, disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that the agency's current successes against Tor rely on identifying users and then attacking vulnerable software on their computers. One technique developed by the agency targeted the Firefox web browser used with Tor, giving the agency full ...

Media outlets are holding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to a higher standard by scandalizing her use of personal email while at the State Department, claiming the practice raises questions about her "transparency." In reality, other public officials -- including former Florida Governor Jeb Bush (R), who is attacking Clinton over the emails, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell -- have exclusively used personal email.

Media Use NYT Report On Clinton's Use Of Personal Emails To Hold Clinton To A Higher Standard

NY Times: Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email As Secretary Of State. In a March 2 report, The New York Times highlighted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of personal email for official government business during her time at the department. [The New York Times, 3/2/15]

NY Times: Jeb Bush Took "A Very Different Approach" Than Clinton Because He Released Emails From His Time ...

The New York Times accused Hillary Clinton of potentially violating federal law pertaining to the preservation of e-mail records while acting as Secretary of State, but requirements to maintain such records did not exist during her tenure.

The New York Times Accused Clinton Of Possible Wrong-Doing With Usage Of Non-Government Emails

NYT: Clinton's Use Of Private Email During Time At The State Department May Have Violated Federal Law. In a March 2 report, The New York Times accused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of possibly having "violated federal requirements that officials' correspondence be retained as part of the agency's record" with the use of personal email for official government business during her time at the department.The Times reported, "Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered government records and are supposed to be ...

Always viewing conflicts through the prism of partisan warfare, conservative media have been faced with a stark choice as Bill O'Reilly's long list of confirmed fabrications pile up in public view. They can defend the Fox News host no matter what, while lashing out his "far-left" critics for daring to fact-check the host. Or, conservative media outlets can let him fend for himself. (The third, obvious option of openly criticizing O'Reilly for his duplicitous ways doesn't seem to be on the table.)

Incredibly, as the controversy marches on and neither O'Reilly nor Fox are able to provide simple answers to the questions about his truth-telling as a reporter, some conservative media allies continue to rally by his side.

On Sunday, Howard Kurtz's MediaBuzz program on Fox came to O'Reilly's aid by doing everything it could to whitewash the allegations against the host ...

Chris Cox, the National Rifle Association's top lobbyist, falsely claimed that a recent move by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to ban a type of armor-piercing ammunition is motivated by animus towards women. In fact, the proposal aims to protect law enforcement officers.

On February 13 the ATF published a letter describing its intent to ban the importation and manufacture of a type of armor-piercing ammunition commonly called "green tip" that is used in AR-15 and other "AR-type" assault weapons. Because the "green tip" round contains a steel penetrator, it is more powerful than some other types of ammunition used in such firearms, and its use is already banned at some shooting ranges, including the NRA's.

The ATF is moving to ban "green tip" because it can penetrate a law enforcement officer's body armor when fired from a pistol. While in the past ...

The publisher of a Bill O'Reilly book in which he falsely claims to have seen terrorists kill civilians with bombs in Northern Ireland are standing behind the Fox News host despite an admission by Fox News that he only saw photos of those events.

David Drake, senior vice president and deputy publisher at Crown Publishing Group, wrote in an email to Media Matters that "Crown will continue to publish our author's book just as he wrote it."

That book is Keep it Pithy: Useful Observations In A Tough World, O'Reilly's 2013 work published under Crown Archetype, a division of Random House.

In the book, O'Reilly writes, "I've seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America, Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs."

But last Friday, The Washington Post's Paul Farhi reported that Fox News admitted that O ...

Reverend Flip Benham, the father of would-be reality stars David Benham and Jason Benham, and a group Christians confronted several transgender women as they attempted to use the women’s restrooms during a debate over a non-discrimination ordinance in North Carolina this week. Hundreds of...

The group American Atheists addressed the controversy surrounding its billboards in Nashville, Tennessee by pointing out that it’s hypocritical of the company to censor the group’s advertising when Christian groups routinely promote antigay, pro-religion messages in their own publicity...

A Florida pastor claims his religious rights were violated after city officials investigated whether his church had the necessary permits on file. Pastor Mike Olive operates the Common Ground Church and Coffee Bar in Lake Worth, which recently took over code enforcement from the fire department....

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned of the danger Iran’s nuclear program posed to the world, comparing the Iranian government to the Nazi regime in a speech to Congress Tuesday that was preceded by a weekslong partisan feud in Washington. “Iran’s regime is not merely a Jewish...

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an election stop today at the House chamber before a joint meeting of the US Congress, less a few dozen Democratic lawmakers who boycotted his stump speech. But those who showed up were in for a rollicking good time as the prime minister made his case...

Frank Underwood is known for deceiving people into acting against their own best interests. (We’ll miss you, President Walker.) Now we learn that this trait may extend to the series that features him.

The greatest betrayals on “House of Cards” can be found in the misleading arguments, presented as “truth,” that suggest that cutting “entitlements” is a necessity and raising taxes isn’t even an option.

The fact that Netflix has insisted upon heavy tax breaks for filming the show in Maryland may be merely coincidental. Here’s what’s not: We have learned that the series hired a leading “new Democrat” (read, “corporate Democrat”) as a consultant for the show’s most misleading episode.

The audience loves watching Frank Underwood deceive other characters. It’s less likely to appreciate being deceived itself, especially as some real-life Frank Underwoods are launching an attack against the party’s populist wing ...

House Speaker John Boehner has learned (yet again) what happens when you play zero-sum politics. Sometimes you end up with nothing, and that's what will happen later today, it appears.

Slate:

House Speaker John Boehner told his GOP caucus Tuesday morning that the lower chamber will vote as soon as later Tuesday to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the remainder of the fiscal year. That bill—which lacks any of the immigration-reform-blocking strings that House conservatives had demanded in exchange for DHS funding—has already passed the Senate.

Today's display by Bibi Netanyahu before a joint session of Congress was predictably extreme with predictable adulation by his Republican worshippers, but it's not that much different or any less wrong than the speech he delivered in 2002 when he told Congress that Iraq had nuclear weapons, pinky swear they did.

We all know how that turned out, don't we? Vox:

Indeed, Netanyahu was a rather aggressive Iraq hawk back in the early 2000s. "There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons," Netanyahu said in 2002 testimony to Congress. "Once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons,"

Not only did Netanyahu get the nuclear issue wrong — Saddam was not building a nuclear program after all — but he incorrectly predicted that the war would inspire an Iranian democratic uprising that would topple ...

Much like the recent Washington Post "expose" that proved the Clinton Foundation once improperly took a contribution from Algeria for Haitian earthquake relief, today's New York Times story about Hillary Clinton's email account lacks a certain ... proportion.

Here's the story in a nutshell: Hillary Clinton never used a government email account while she was secretary of state.

Mrs. Clinton is not the first government official — or first secretary of state — to use a personal email account on which to conduct official business. But her exclusive use of her private email, for all of her work, appears unusual, Mr. Baron said. The use of private email accounts is supposed to be limited to emergencies, experts said, such as when an agency’s computer server is not working.

“I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a high-ranking official at an executive branch agency ...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address a joint meeting of Congress in Washington, D.C. on the morning of Tuesday, March 3 in a speech scheduled for 11 a.m. EST. The address, which was arranged by Republican leaders without the knowledge of the Obama administration, has exposed tensions in the relationship between the prime minister and President Barack Obama.

During his address Tuesday, Prime Minister Netanyahu is expected to criticize the Obama administration’s efforts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry opened a new round of talks in Geneva Monday aimed at reaching an agreement with Iran over the country’s nuclear program before a deadline set for later this month.

How many ways did Andrea Tantaros and her Outnumbered cohosts side against America and with Israel, while ignoring the opposite sentiments of their countrymen? I lost count.

Tantaros recently attacked President Obama for saying he believes in American exceptionalism just like the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. But even that bit of love for her country was nowhere to be seen in Tantaros today as she all but cheered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political slap in the face of President Obama via an address to Congress tomorrow.

I can just imagine how Tantaros would be squawking like a stuck chickenhawk if a foreign country – to whom we give $3.1 billion a year – had he or she buddied up to the Democrats and then snubbed George W. Bush because of opposition to one of his policies.

Great All-American Hero War-Winnin’ Savior and former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus has admitted to pillow-talking classified information into his mistress’s ear, which is against the law, it turns out, who knew? But, despite our gleeful prediction in January that perhaps he would do some, uh, HARD time for betraying his country to get some strange, that won’t be happening because what is he, some kind of common criminal?

Read more on General Petraeus Pleads Guilty To Being Too Sexy For His Pants…

You’ve got to at least respect the cunning of the oil industry buddies in Congress who are pushing a pair of bills aimed at restricting the EPA: They’ve given their bills names that Frank Luntz would just love — the “Secret Science Reform Act” and the “Science Advisory Board Reform Act.” Those sound nice! After all, science shouldn’t be secret, it should be open and transparent! And we definitely want to make sure that Congress gets good advice on using science, don’t we? Oklahoma Rep. Frank Lucas and Texas Rep. Lamar Smith just care about the people having input on government, as long as the people you’re talking about have names like Exxon/Mobil and Shell.

Read more on Republicans Will Save Hero Polluters From EPA’s Mad Scientists…

The New York Times reported an explosive breaking exclusive ZOMG! Clinton scandal on Monday night, so turn on the Drudge Siren and grab your splooge sock because CLINTON SCANDAL!!!!

Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Read more on Hillary Clinton Did An Email Thing That May Or May Not Be Wrong, And The NYT Is ON IT…

Last night, the Southern town of Charlotte, North Carolina, did a real big stupid, failing to pass an anti-discrimination ordinance that would add LGBT people to the list of protected groups. Wingnut opponents of the ordinance, of course, were most worried about the possibility that somewhere, somehow, a transgender person might be out there responding to the call of nature, and not even ashamed of themselves for it. This is an outrage, because how dare they, despite what you have heard in children’s books, NOT EVERYBODY POOPS, especially not transgender people!

Idaho state Sen. Steve Vick is all in favor of the First Amendment and freedom and stuff, but that doesn’t mean he has to sit and put up with it when a Hindu cleric gives the invocation at today’s session of the state Senate, which is why he plans on walking out on the pagan voodoo nonsense. Why yes, he is from the same northern Idaho county whose local Republican party floated a proposal to declare Idaho a Christian state last week. Why do you ask?

Read more on Idaho Legislator Has A Cow About Hindu Invocation In State Senate…

Pop quiz: What do you do if you’re the last vestige of Lehman Brothers, the banking and investment company whose demise was the biggest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history and now you’re in the post-bankruptcy process of slowly unraveling the clusterfuck that you caused in the world economy? Do you a) feel really sorry and promise never to be in charge of more than $15 of anyone else’s money for the entire rest of your life, or b) give your employees $44 million in bonuses, because even though they work for the remains of the company that started a global financial meltdown, they’re still swell! Yeah, this quiz was too easy, ugh, the answer is b. And we ask ourselves, once again, how is it that Occupy didn’t end up with heads on spikes?

Mark Twain famously noted, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." The current efforts to roll back the ability of working people to counterbalance the corporate domination of American politics is firmly rooted in the initial corporate opposition to the Wagner Act of 1935 that finally assured American workers the right to organize and bargain for wages and working conditions. Among those early efforts to reduce the strength of unions was an effort led by Vance Muse.

Muse, a Texas oil man, didn't like unions and he really didn't like the shape the union movement was taking in the 1930s. Large industrial unions like the United Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers were growing with white and black workers. Turns out Muse represented the old-line plutocrats' views on economics and race. His view of this new-found economic "brotherhood" was: "From now on, white women and white ...

Were there gay men at one of the year's biggest gatherings of conservatives? Of course there were!

Paul Detric, a reporter for Reason.TV, attended this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and used the gay hook-up app Grindr to try and track down gays attending the event. Rather unsurprisingly, he found a number of them and several were willing to talk to Detric -- though not necessarily on camera.

The most compelling response in the series of interviews might be from one attendee who admitted that he feels conservative ideology is behind the times.

"Especially for conservatives to be able to win an election, they're going to need to get younger voters. To do that they need to start being more socially liberal -- essentially they need to shift libertarian.”

Another young man added, "if we're true conservatives, we really don't want the government to be ...

Last November, something extraordinary happened in Florida's capital city. Despite steep opposition from entrenched interests, a tenacious coalition of citizens, from the tea party on the right to Common Cause on the left, crafted a powerful ballot initiative to fight the corruption of money in politics and reclaim government for the people. On Election Day, they won: the Tallahassee Anti-Corruption Act passed with the support of a stunning 67 percent of voters.

After decades of failed attempts to fix our broken democracy by politely asking members of Congress to dismantle the same system that put them into power, the lesson behind the victory in Tallahassee is clear: Forget trying to push money in politics reform through Washington. It's time to take this fight local.

Until now, perhaps the single greatest stumbling block for the reform movement has been that many Americans are convinced victory is impossible, especially in ...

WASHINGTON -- After Los Angeles police shot and killed an unarmed homeless man on Sunday, Chief Charlie Beck said the man grabbed an officer's holstered gun. Beck said a still image from a video of the incident showed the victim going for the officer's waistband.

"It appears that the suspect's hand is reaching for the officer’s waistband in the area where his pistol would be located," Beck said during a press conference on Monday.

Police frequently cite reaching for waistbands in the aftermath of shootings by officers, though it's usually people allegedly reaching for their own waistbands, where armed suspects often do conceal guns. The most famous recent unarmed waistband incident may have been the Ferguson, Missouri, police shooting of Michael Brown last year.

After the Brown shooting, HuffPost used media reports to compile a partial list of unarmed waistband shootings since 2010. This story is ...

Jim Tankersley called up Larry Summers to ask him to clarify his views on whether automation is hurting middle-class job prospects. Despite reports that he no longer supports this view, apparently he does:

Tankersley: How do you think about the effects of technology and automation on workers today, particularly those in the middle class?

Summers: No one should speak with certainty about these matters, because there are challenges in the statistics, and there are conflicts in the data. But it seems to me that there is a wave of what certainly appears to be labor-substitutive innovation. And that probably, we are only in the early innings of such a wave.

I think this is precisely right. I suspect that:

Automation began having an effect on jobs around the year 2000.
The effect is very small so far.
So small, in fact, that it probably can't be measured reliably. There ...

Yesterday was one of my bad days, but one consequence of that is that I zoned out in front of the TV for long stretches. This allowed me to hear an endless procession of talking heads spend time talking about what we should do about Iran.

The striking thing was not that there was lots of criticism from conservatives about President Obama's negotiating strategy. The striking thing was the complete lack of any real alternative from these folks. I listened to interviewer after interviewer ask various people what they'd do instead, and the answers were all the weakest of weak tea. A few mentioned tighter sanctions, but without much conviction since (a) sanctions are already pretty tight and (b) even the hawks seem to understand that mere sanctions are unlikely to stop Iran's nuclear program anyway. Beyond that there there was nothing.

The Iraqi military, alongside thousands of Shiite militia fighters, began a large-scale offensive on Monday to retake the city of Tikrit from the Islamic State....Monday’s attack, which officials said involved more than 30,000 fighters supported by Iraqi helicopters and jets, was the boldest effort yet to recapture Tikrit and, Iraqi officials said, the largest Iraqi offensive anywhere in the country since the Islamic State took control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June. It was unclear if airstrikes from the American-led coalition, which has been bombing Islamic State positions in Iraq since August, were involved in the early stages of the offensive on Monday.

From a military perspective, capturing Tikrit is seen as an important precursor to an operation to retake Mosul, which lies farther north. Success in Tikrit could push up the timetable for a Mosul campaign, while failure would most ...

From Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, on the tactics of tea partiers who are holding up the DHS funding bill over their increasingly pointless insistence that it include a provision repealing President Obama's immigration program:

While conservative leaders are trying to move the ball up the field, these other members sit in exotic places like basements of Mexican restaurants and upper levels of House office buildings, seemingly unaware that they can't advance conservatism by playing fantasy football with their voting cards.

This morning, once again trying to show that fighting against Wisconsin labor unions is pretty much the same as fighting ISIS or communism, Scott Walker repeated his contention that Ronald Reagan's early move to fire striking air traffic controllers was more than just an attack on organized labor. It was also a critical foreign policy decision. Here's what he originally said last month on Morning Joe:

One of the most powerful foreign policy decisions that I think was made in our lifetime was one that Ronald Reagan made early in his presidency when he fired the air traffic controllers....What it did, it showed our allies around the world that we were serious and more importantly that this man to our adversaries was serious.

Years later, documents released from the Soviet Union showed that that exactly was the case. The Soviet Union started treating [Reagan] more seriously once ...

Even the ever-hawkish Robert Kagan thinks Republicans blew it by inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress:

Looking back on it from years hence, will the spectacle of an Israeli prime minister coming to Washington to do battle with an American president wear well or poorly?

....Is anyone thinking about the future? From now on, whenever the opposition party happens to control Congress — a common enough occurrence — it may call in a foreign leader to speak to a joint meeting of Congress against a president and his policies. Think of how this might have played out in the past. A Democratic-controlled Congress in the 1980s might, for instance, have called the Nobel Prize-winning Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to denounce President Ronald Reagan’s policies in Central America. A Democratic-controlled Congress in 2003 might have called French President Jacques Chirac to oppose President George W. Bush’s ...

As we await the Netanyahu speech to Congress, it's worth noting that aside from violating old traditions of U.S.-Israel relations and politicizing sensitive diplomacy in the most abrasive way possible,...

I've written at great length about this speech, in anticipation of it, and about the Israeli election, to which it is inextricably connected. If you step back, it is amazing that this even happened. A foreign head of state gave a speech to the US Congress explicitly criticizing and trying to block the diplomacy of a sitting U.S. president. Having said all that, what about the speech itself?

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who did not attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress, railed against House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Tuesday for inviting Netanyahu to speak before Congress.

"That the Speaker of the House of Representatives would allow the floor of this chamber to be used to undercut the negotiations of the President of the United States is partisan, and it is not right," Lewis said during a press conference following the speech. "The Speaker's action is an affront to the President of the United States, to the Democratic leadership of Congress, and the Department of State."

Eulogies are a celebration of the life of the deceased. But in his remembrance of Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich (R) on Tuesday, former U.S. Sen. John Danforth (R-MO) combined high praise for the dead with forcefully harsh words for the state GOP chairman who has been linked to Schweich's suicide.

"The unbreakable bonds between the United States and Israel are rooted in our shared values, our common ideals and mutual interests," Pelosi said in a Tuesday statement following Netanyahu's speech to Congress. "That is why, as one who values the U.S. – Israel relationship, and loves Israel, I was near tears throughout the Prime Minister’s speech – saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States as part of the P5 +1 nations, and saddened by the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran and our broader commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) on Tuesday said that she thought Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech was "powerful" but lacked alternatives to the current nuclear deal that the U.S. is negotiating with Iran.

"What he didn't say was what would happen if there was no deal," she said on CNN after Netanyahu's speech to Congress. "And he didn't make a suggestion as to what Israel would find agreeable. He simply said, there's nothing that we agree with here. And then he made a number of pronouncements of terrible things that could happen."

The Syrian governmment’s capture of al-Qusair is a “strategic turning point” marking the beginning of the end for the armed opposition, Syria’s premier said, as the army promised mercy for surrendering rebels.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on Thursday morning he's "glad" the National Security Agency is secretly collecting millions of telephone records from Americans in an effort to track down terrorism suspects.

On this week's edition of "The DMZ" on Bloggingheads.tv, Matt Lewis and I dissect the GOP primaries in Georgia and Kentucky and what it means for party's future, and why the left shouldn't be attacking Obama's judicial nominees. Watch it...

On this week's edition of "The DMZ" on Bloggingheads.tv, Matt Lewis and I assess whether the GOP primaries will make it safe for immigration reform, why the GOP is embracing identity politics and why the left should resist Nader's call...

Me: Do we have someone named Forrest working with us?Stephanie: Yes! He just volunteered to do a research project about how various congressional campaigns spent their money in 2008. He's researching Grayson first.Me: ah!

I relayed the news to Stoller, who had recently left OpenLeft to work for Rep. Alan Grayson -- letting him know that this guy poking around asking probing questions was legit.

Subequent Gchat conversation with Forrest:

Me: how'd you join the PCCC list?Forrest: i think i read a post by Bowers about itMe: he wrote some nice stuff Forrest: i read almost everything on openleft

Forrest (who makes a cameo at the front of this recent PCCC video) was a 17 year ...

Thanks for being part of this community, and thank you for letting me develop my voice and ideas in concert with your voice and your ideas. In 2007, Chris, Mike, and I started OpenLeft based on the idea that there was a new ideologically left-wing yet open set of actors on stage. I still think this is true, and perhaps, there's some of that going on right now in the uprisings in the Middle East. Though it's in fashion, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on Egypt, except to note that Facebook will totally set everyone free. Thanks, Zuck!

The signs of a world undergoing profound change are everywhere. Wikileaks is a genuine social innovation, a new form of collaborative media that scales what Daniel Ellsberg did. The political blogosphere, and then the financial blogs, have sketched an open counter-elite that can truly challenge ...

This has been a wonderful community to be a very small part of. When Matt and Chris said they were leaving MyDD, I knew I would be following them to wherever they were going. I thought they were full of wild and crazy ideas, but ones that could be implemented.

They knew that principles mattered because they set the course of events. Principles told you when you were veering off course.

My identifier on this site was this quote from a Matt Stoller piece during the 2008 election cycle

"Incrementalism isn't a different path to the same place, it could be a different path to a different place"

I have been doing politics in different ways at different levels for many years. From being one of the founders of the first women's "liberation" group in Boston, to marching in the streets against war and for equality, to helping ...

Please see the end for my thanks yous and where to find me after today. I have opted to close with an attempt to describe the field of play -D

Shortly after Kerry's loss in 2004, at MyDD, Chris wrote "Conservatism is our enemy" which I think is the first time I ever encountered a direct ideological assault on conservatism itself. Along with Phil Agre's rightly famous essay on the subject, it began me on a road and mission to better understanding this beast. Everything I have learned to date from then continues to bolster Chris' original thesis. Conservativism is still the primary enemy of progress, justice, fairness and widespread happiness for humanity. It remains a destructive and corrosive force on the institutions of democracy and the single biggest obstacle to world peace.

How about, "See you around"? I don't know where, exactly, though I do have some good ideas. More on that at the end.

While that may suffice for us individually, though, it certainly can't for us as a community. And that's what I will miss most of all about Open Left. Of course I'm grateful to Chris, Matt & Mike for creating this place, and then giving me the opportunity to write here. But I've always craved online writing because of the immediacy of hearing what people think of what you've written, because there is so much to be learned. It's axiomatic, really, that the group mind is orders of magnitude smarter than the individual mind, so the smartest thing the individual mind can do is find the best way to benefit from the group mind.

It's not just about intelligence, of course. It's also about wisdom, compassion, humor, patience, forgiveness, forbearance, resilience... and on, and ...

The new governor continues to be good, proposing increasing the state's minimum wage to $10.10/hour. I have no idea what will get through the Republicans who run the legislative branch, but we will see..

We've collectively decided that putting kids in 3000 pounds of metal traveling at 65 MPH is safe, while letting them walk unsupervised can potentially get them taken away from you and placed in a foster situation. Also known to be safe.

Section 1311 of the Affordable Care Act (PDF) ("Obamacare") provides, in part, as follows: Each State shall, not later than January 1, 2014, establish an American Health Benefit Exchange (referred to in this title as an...

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The British media and the U.S. media have something in common: When a spontaneous event occurs and they get caught flat-footed, in a race to compete with other news organizations, they throw traditional vetting rules out the window and report...

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The First Circuit Court of Appeals has denied Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's request to order his trial moved from Boston due to the inability to seat a fair and impartial jury. The vote was 2 to 1:
In a dissenting opinion, Circuit Judge Juan R....

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Indonesia President Joko Widodo has rejected Austrialian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's plea for mercy for Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, which was made by telephone call earlier in the week.
In an interview with daily business newspaper...

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The tributes to Leonard Nimoy that have filled newspaper front pages and television broadcasts since his death Friday have begun to reveal a measure of the man’s remarkable reach, which extended far beyond his development of perhaps the most enduring and beloved character in modern science fiction.

He was a dedicated artist who acted on stage and screen, directed plays and films, wrote poetry and earned praise for his photography; a generous donor to the arts and many causes; a proud Screen Actors Guild- American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) member; and an early champion of diversity and pay equity—as was revealed in recent reports on how Mr. Spock advocated for equal pay for Lt. Uhura (actress Nichelle Nichols).

So perhaps it will not come as a surprise that, at the height of his initial fame, Nimoy was ...

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell this Wednesday, and once again the fate of the Affordable Care Act will be in the nine justices’ hands. Unlike National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius, the 2012 case that affirmed the ACA’s individual mandate but gutted its expansion of Medicaid, King turns not on the act’s constitutionality but rather on an statutory issue variously described as “bordering on frivolous,” “nested in a fictional history of Congressional intent,” and “fluff.” But like the prior case, whose result effectively denied health insurance to half of the 17 million intended to have been covered by the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid, King, if decided against the government, could leave another ...

I have known Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker since he was a young state legislator. We used to talk a good deal about our differing views on how to reform things: campaign finance rules, ethics regulations, social-welfare programs.

We seldom reached agreement. But I gave him credit for respecting the search for common ground. And for understanding that a disagreement on a particular matter is never an excuse for ending the search—or for disregarding others who are engaged in it.

But that was long ago. Scott Walker has changed a great deal—and not, I fear, for the better.

He is deep into a political career that has seen plenty of ups and downs; and, now, he is grasping for a top rung on the ladder: the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2016.

On Thursday, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Walker was asked ...

The Federal Communications Commission has finally taken the necessary steps to preserve a free and open Internet by guaranteeing net neutrality.

With the commission’s 3-2 vote on Thursday, the issue is settled.

For now.

Then it will rise again. No, there will not be a mass outcry against net neutrality, the premise that all Internet communications should be treated equally. There will be no popular demand for ending net neutrality protections against the development of a two-tier Internet, where “paying” content (from multinational corporations and powerful special interests) moves on an information superhighway, while “non-paying” content (from grassroots groups and dissenting citizens) is diverted onto a digital dirt road.

But there will be campaign donations, lobbying and spin from telephone and cable companies that have too much at stake to give up on ...

Rahm Emanuel had everything going for him in his race for a second term as mayor of Chicago.

He was the incumbent in a city that tends to keep its mayors—sometimes for decades.

He had the endorsements of the city’s major daily newspapers—and a constant media presence in the form of more than $7 million in TV ads.

He had a twelve-to-one fundraising advantage against his closest competitor—and his campaign treasury was constantly being refueled by wealthy out-of-town donors and corporate special-interest groups.

He had the endorsement of his former boss, President Obama, who recorded campaign commercials for Emanuel and who jetted into Chicago just days before Tuesday’s election and appeared at the mayor’s side.

Emanuel had everything—except a sufficient number of votes to avoid an April 7 runoff ...

Demonstrators march in New York City during the Justice for All rally and march in December 2014. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

On the heels of the Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin tragedies—and in light of more recent injustices like the fatal shooting of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, an unarmed Mexican national whom Pasco, Washington, police officers saw fit to shoot multiple times despite his apparent surrender—there’s plenty of reason to despair the sorry state of our criminal-justice system and the havoc it wreaks on the lives of too many innocent victims and their families.

But these days, there is some reason for hope. In the wake of so much cop-on-civilian violence, we’re beginning to hear a national rallying ...

That should be the title of this piece, which is actually titled “Centrist Dems ready strike against Warren wing”: Centrist Democrats are gathering their forces to fight back against the “Elizabeth Warren wing” of their party, fearing a sharp turn to the left could prove disastrous in the 2016 elections. For months, moderate Democrats have [Read more...]

I didn’t put the puppies in my room last night because they were sound asleep on a pillow, and when I woke up at 4 am to go to the bathroom, I found this: Who needs a feather bed and a down comforter with the fat snoring human when you have this?

I’m at home today as my little guy was sent home from daycare before he was there long enough to wash his hands before breakfast. He is just not himself. He walked down the two steps from our garage to the ground instead of taking a HUMONGOUS JUMP from the last step over the puddle [Read more...]

Via Buzzfeed, here’s an amazing photo of a baby weasel riding a woodpecker: According to the photographer, the weasel was trying to bring the bird down to eat it, but the woodpecker ultimately escaped after giving the weasel a brief taste of flight. In other news, Israeli PM Netanyahu is scheduled to address Congress at [Read more...]
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As we rush headlong into the first of what are sure to be many "Clinton Records Scandals" (it's a perennial) I just thought I'd remind everyone of one thing: Cokie's Law, in which she proved that truth and facts are rarely the issue when it comes to arcane Clinton scandals:"At this point,it doesn't much matter whether she said it or not because it's become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about."Once people are talking about it, it's a legitimate news story. So they publish stories that imply something or other "doesn't pass the smell test", the news media get weirdly excited about it, convey that to the people and then we're off to the races.

As loved as Leonard Nimoy and his signature character Mr. Spock are, I thought this would be appreciated. It's from Marty Kaplan, a longtime Hollywood and political insider, and also a writer (see his bio at the end of this piece).

This is from Nimoy's time directing the 1988 film A Good Mother, which starred Diane Keaton, ten years from Annie Hall, Jason Robards, and a young Liam Neeson. Kaplan and Nimoy developed a 30-year-long relationship, which apparently started with this shoot and this exchange.

In Kaplan's telling, it's vintage Nimoy and vintage Spock. Kaplan is the Disney studio executive on the set of the picture. His job is to relay instruction from the "suits" back home to the director, in this case, Nimoy. In this scene, Nimoy plays Nimoy.

Centrist Democrats are gathering their forces to fight back against the “Elizabeth Warren wing” of their party, fearing a sharp turn to the left could prove disastrous in the 2016 elections.

[snip]

The New Democrat Coalition (NDC), a caucus of moderate Democrats in the House, plans to unveil an economic policy platform as soon as this week in an attempt to chart a different course.

"I have great respect for Sen. Warren — she's a tremendous leader,” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), one of the members working on the policy proposal. “My own preference is to create a message without bashing businesses or workers, [the latter of which] happens on the other side."

Peters said that, if Democrats are going to win back the House and Senate, "it's going to be through the work of the ...

President Bush vetoed Saturday legislation meant to ban the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, saying it "would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror."

"This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

Congress approved an intelligence authorization bill that contains the waterboarding provision on slim majorities, far short of the two-thirds needed to override a presidential veto.Bush's long-expected veto reignites the Washington debate over the proper limits of U.S. interrogation policies and whether the CIA has engaged in torture by subjecting prisoners to severe tactics ...

Dispatch from the campaign of the most overrated politician in America

by digby

I have been saying for months that Scott Walker is just another manifestation of the political class'bizarre obsession with finding a great Republican leader from the upper Mid-West and have characterized him as the most overrated politician in America.

Byron York seems to have noticed the problem:

[A] huge part of Walker's appeal right now: He seems to be the Republican candidate who has the best chance of connecting with the millions of middle-class voters who have drifted away from the GOP in recent elections. And for that reason, Walker looks like the man who can attract almost everyone in the Republican camp — social, economic, and national security conservatives — in addition to those disaffected voters. That's a huge plus for Walker and, along with his impressive record in Wisconsin, is the reason he has ...

Watching network television news, you'd think the entire Earth had entered an Ice Age just because it's been cold in Manhattan.
While February was unusually cold in the Northeast and Midwest, what's not being mentioned on TV is that records have been falling on the high end of the temperature scale for the entire winter across [...]

I didn't want to say anything about this last week, given the hard fought and well won victory of Net Neutrality proponents. They worked hard and long and smartly and organized very well and deserved at least a few days of victory laps for the effort.
Indeed, as noted in attorney Ernie Canning's piece here Thursday, [...]

The courageous 'Tea Party' leader and former County Sheriff who hid behind the women on the 'front lines of freedom' at the Bundy Ranch last year, is now asking the public to pay for much needed health care for both himself and his wife. Via TPM...
Former Arizona county sheriff Richard Mack, a fierce opponent of [...]

Hat-tip @TomTomorrow who notes that the toon above, from September of last year, won a silver medal from the Society of Illustrators on Thursday, the day before Leonard Nimoy passed away on Friday. "Seems somewhat bittersweet now," he added. "Wonder if @TheRealNimoy ever saw it."

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), Chair of the Senate Environment Committee, offered the following persuasive argument on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Thursday to underscore his case that "global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people"...
Pretty rock solid evidence. Nonetheless, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) was somehow able to muster up [...]

On Thursday, by way of a 3-2 vote, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted 'Net Neutrality' regulations that embody the "bright-line" rules that had been proposed by President Barack Obama last November.
The new policy is unquestionably a victory for both the idea of Internet freedom, as well as for the unprecedented campaign waged by the [...]

By Raouf J. Halaby | (LeMonde Diplomatique) – Published in 1929, German author Thomas Mann’s novella Mario and the Magician is not only Mann’s evocatively compelling and poignantly potent comment on the…

For the past couple weeks, the American media has focused on the fact that various members of congress planned on skipping Netanyahu’s speech. Predictably, this was perceived by many on the right as the latest example of Obama, and other prominent Democrats, failing to support Israel sufficiently. This is, of course, a massive red herring and a distraction from very real and dangerous issues; mainly, Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and its unyielding push for war against Iran. Netanyahu’s speech was strikingly bellicose, even by his standards, as he compared the leadership of Iran to the Nazis and ISIS. Much will be made about the farcical comparisons, but he also said a number of ridiculous things that President Obama, and others who skipped the speech, agree with him on. Netanyahu’s speech was an attack ...

Walker demonizes unions, the poor and voters of color in order to appeal to whites.

Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s drive for an anti-labor “right to work” law covering private-sector workers is deeply rooted in the racism of the Deep South’s former slaveholding states.

They are yet more evidence that he is following a template known as the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy,” which plays to white voters’ racial resentment, even though his budding presidential campaign is based in snow-encrusted Wisconsin.

This emerging strategy is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s original “Southern strategy” of 1968 and Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign kickoff event. Reagan started his campaign by championing state's rights in Neshoba County in Mississippi, a site whose only national symbolic significance was serving as the site of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers.

Many progressive commentators have asserted that major demographic shifts among ...

Don't imagine that being a racist is something that only happens to other people.

If there’s anything our fraught national dialogue on race has taught us, it's that there are no racists in this country. (In fact, not only do multiple studies confirm that most white Americans generally believe racism is over — just 16 percent say there’s a lot of racial discrimination — it turns out that many actually believe white people experience more discrimination than black people.) It’s a silly idea, of course, but it’s easy to delude ourselves into thinking that inequality is a result of cultural failures, racial pathology and a convoluted narrative involving black-on-black crime, hoodies, rap music and people wearing their pants too low. To admit that racism is fundamental to who we are, that it imbues our thinking in ways we wouldn’t and couldn’t believe without the ...

In response to a press question, Boehner puckers up his lips and ... watch below.

With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the reign of Boehner and McConnell is upon us. Or, as Jon Stewart said last night, the unstoppable duo "turtle and carrot." One of the GOP's first hits: blocking funding for the Department of Homeland Security in a fit over immigration policy. It's an odd move, Stewart notes, given how practically every prominent Republican has spent the past few years telling Americans we're all going to die because our borders are insecure.

Clearly, no one can work with a Republican House -- not even Republicans, Stewart concludes. But no amount of GOP obstructionism and poor governance can prepare us for the horror of ... John Boehner's kissy face. In response to a press question, Boehner puckers up his lips and ... watch below ...

Taser International, one of the nation's largest suppliers of body cameras, has direct connections to some police chiefs who have been advocating on its behalf.

According to an AP report, the company is covering travel costs for cops that praise their products at international conferences. It's also hiring retired chiefs as consultants, after their cities sign contracts with Taser. After the police chief in Fort Worth, Texas obtained a contract with the company, he wrote one of their representatives an email, insisting that he deserved a raise. In Salt Lake City, the police department bypassed City Council approval to secure a contract with Taser and, in Albuquerque, Taser's connection to the police chief sparked an investigation by the city’s inspector general.

After the death of Michael Brown, body cameras became a staple of calls ...

The enduring question now has a scientific answer: 13.12 centimetres (5.16 inches) in length when erect, and 11.66 cm around, according to an analysis of more than 15,000 appendages around the world.

In a flaccid state, it found, the penis of the average Joe is all of 9.16 cm in length and has a girth of 9.31 cm.

The numbers should help “reassure the large majority of men that the size of their penis is in the normal range,” said British researchers who had assembled data from studies where participants had their member measured by a professional.

The team then used the collated numbers to devise a graph that doctors can use in counselling men with “small penis anxiety”.

Everyone of us can relate to having once been a stupid teenager, irrationally whining to our parents about needing to hang out with that group, wear this outfit, etc.

Such is the case of 19-year-old Akhror Saidakhmetov of Brooklyn who had a burning desire to join club ISIS, like all the cool kids seem to be doing these days. But despite having all the gear to prove he was ready to commit to the band, Saidakhmetov's dreams were ultimately crushed by a very adolescent roadblock—his mom. From the Times:

Mr. Juraboev and Mr. Saidakhmetov bought tickets, planning to travel to Turkey and then sneak into Syria, court papers say, and as the date of their departure neared, they seemed eager.

But Mr. Saidakhmetov still needed his passport, and on Feb. 19 he called his mother. In a conversation recorded by federal agents, he asked for it. She asked ...

California's three-strikes law used to mean that all third-time felons had to spend at least 25 years behind bars—pretty harsh, considering that the third strike could be the result of stealing a $2.50 pair of tube socks. Last year, voters decided to scale back the policy, and passed two initiatives to give judges more sentencing discretion and retroactively reduce the penalties for low-level drug and theft crimes. Law enforcement leaders warned that the reform would set free "thousands of dangerous inmates," and called it "a radical package of ill-conceived policies" that "will endanger Californians."

But almost five months after the second initiative passed, that warning sounds increasingly overblown. About 45 percent of inmates released from California prisons normally re-offend within 18 months. Of roughly 2,000 former life prisoners freed as a result of the three-strikes reform, only 4.7 percent have returned to prison, according to ...

While speaking before the Senate's Banking Committee on Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) hit Fed Chair Janet Yellen with a string of harsh questions over the performance of Scott Alvarez, the Fed's general counsel, who is at the helm of an investigation of a Fed leak from September 2012.

Warren has expressed frustrations over the investigation's lack of public information.

"Wall Street banks could profit handsomely if they knew about the Fed’s plans before the rest of the market found out, and that’s why any leak of confidential information from the Fed results in serious penalties for the people who are responsible," Warren said on Tuesday. "But apparently there have been no consequences for the most recent leak."

The Massachusetts senator specifically pointed to Alvarez's Wall Street-friendly reputation, mainly referring to his past criticisms of Dodd-Frank, when she asked Yellen whether the Fed's ...

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted to categorize the internet as a public utility and thereby uphold strong net neutrality regulations.

Advocates applauded the passage as a victory for internet consumers, blocking what had been described as the creation of internet "fast lanes" for companies willing to pay more for high-speed service.

The vote came down to a 3-2 margin, with dissents from Republicans Michael O'Reilly and Ajut Pai.

"The action that we take today is an irrefutable reflection of the principle that no one, whether government or corporate, should control free open access to the internet," FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said prior to the vote.

"The internet is simply too important to allow broadband providers to be the ones making the rules," he added.

In recent months, net neutrality has emerged as a divisive political issue, with fierce opposition against regulations coming from Republicans and broadband providers ...

Jim Webb is sounding increasingly serious about running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Last week, National Journal's Bob Moser wrote a cover story wondering whether the former Virginia senator could "spark an anti-Hillary uprising," in which Webb explained that his absence from the campaign trail this winter was, in part, the result of major knee surgery to fix problems leftover from his days in the Vietnam War.

Webb struck his first blow against his fellow Democrats on Wednesday. But rather than targeting Clinton, his likely presidential opposition, he struck out against the party's incumbent, President Barack Obama. In a series of tweets, Webb lashed out at the president for vetoing a bill that would have approved construction on the Keystone XL Pipeline.

This show is a call to action to become part of Spring Rising: An Antiwar Intervention in Washington, D.C., March 18-21, 2015, with the big rally and march on Saturday March 21. See http://SpringRising.org

Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.Producer: David Swanson.Music by Duke Ellington.

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When Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma was arrested last week, charged with organizing and leading a coup, the U.S. State Department's spokeswoman Jen Psaki said: "The allegations made by the Venezuelan government that the United States is involved in coup plotting and destabilization are baseless and false. The United States does not support political transitions by non-constitutional means."

Admit awareness of the fact that torture does not work in real life. Sign the petition.

Why is this important?

The popularity and acceptability of torture have soared in the United States and around the world. This is not simply because the United States has tortured. The U.S. government, many of its policies, its wars, and key torture supporters have not seen similar boosts in popularity.

A major contributor to torture's improved image has been Hollywood, led by two productions that have popularized the false belief that torture can produce life-saving information. The U.S. Senate report's summary makes clear that torture has not worked in the real world. In fact, torture has generally not been used to stop an imminent attack, and has been used in some cases to compel agreement with lies about Iraqi links to al Qaeda -- lies ...

Fast death for some,slow for others.Those with money might go undergroundor maybe New Zealand if the windhasn't shifted. Hoping against hope.

Those in the cities have a few minutes to panicand melt.In the hinterlands long struggleswith a slower demise,poisoned milk, nuclear winterswhere crops will not grow.Oh what a deed these mushrooms will do.

Kids under desks won't be saved in their schools, nor will they be saved byfast running moms.

Have you ever noticed your own inclination, or that of other people, to believe what you/they are told by someone seen to be in authority?

For example, did you know that there is overwhelming scientific evidence that the 911 destruction of the World Trade Center buildings 1, 2 and 7 was a false flag operation? That is, 911 was organised by the US and/or Israeli elite(s) and their agents in order to enable them to manipulate public opinion to support their subsequently initiated perpetual war in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Here's Time Magazine's David von Drehle: "The greatest threat that ISIS poses -- even to the poor souls living under ISIS rule -- is the unintended damage that might follow from the effort to eradicate the group. . . . As dangerous as it is to have a terrorist kingdom in the middle of the world's geopolitical tinderbox, ousting ISIS will be every bit as dangerous."

Drehle goes from there immediately into the debate over whether U.S. troops or local troops should do the job. His article is followed by Max Boot arguing for U.S. ground troops and Karl Vick arguing for U.S. bombing with local ground troops. All three writers seem to be aware that ISIS wanted U.S. bombing and wants U.S. ground troops even more, that ISIS recruitment climbs in response to U.S. military action. All three can't help but be aware that ...

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) will propose legislation barring undocumented immigrants from getting tax breaks designed to encourage the poor to work. For Grassley and other Republicans, the breaks are "amnesty bonuses" that undocumented immigrants would be able to receive under the controversial policy President Obama announced last year. The break in question is a payment that low-wage workers receive from the government […]

Sometime later this week, a right-to-work bill appears certain to land on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s desk. Despite the protests of thousands in Madison, he’ll sign it, dealing another blow to labor unions already crippled by laws passed during the Republican’s last term in office. It will also be a symbolic threshold: Wisconsin would be […]

Two weeks ago, the famous economist Larry Summers sat in a chair on a stage at the National Press Club, talked with several other smart people for an hour and briefly upended a major debate in economics. The occasion was a forum, hosted by the Brookings Institution' Hamilton Project, on technological change and its effect on American workers. Summers, […]

Much like beauty, the quality of your hospital is apparently in the eye of the beholder. Consumers who take the time to research where hospitals rank among their competitors may get wildly different impressions depending on where they're getting their information from, according to a new study. Four of some of the most recognizable consumer […]

UnitedHealth, the country’s largest insurer, will soon require doctors to get permission before performing most types of inpatient hysterectomies, a procedure in which the uterus is removed, often to prevent or treat cancer. The move follows lengthy debate over a surgical device believed by many medical researchers to spread cancer in patients -- and highlights […]

The mayor of Cleveland has apologized after the city filed a court document blaming Tamir Rice for his own death in a police shooting last year. Rice was 12. The document stated that Rice's death was caused "by the failure ... to exercise due care to avoid injury," Leila Atassi reports for The Plain Dealer. Rice's family will deliver […]

The worst possible takeaway from President Obama’s speech at the United Nations today is the idea floating around the conservative bubble and even in some of the mainstream media that he sounded like President Bush. Obama has been almost exactly the same on terrorism from his time as a freshman senator to his fifth year... Read More

The Daily Banter can exclusively reveal that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote letters to a mysterious man named “Santa” during her formative years. Clinton’s connections to this man have previously been undisclosed. Santa, who has also operated under the aliases “Father Christmas” and “Kris Kringle,” has apparently been at the center of a... Read More

Over the last few years a simplistic brand of Washington groupthink has been termed the “Green Lantern Theory” of presidential power. It is best embodied by simple-minded pundits like National Journal‘s Ron Fournier and the other permanent residents of the Morning Joe roundtable, who think that if Obama just did — something — he could... Read More

The NFL’s Adrian Peterson beat his child until he bled. The NFL’s Adrian Peterson beat a child on his scrotum. The NFL’s Adrian Peterson didn’t think this was a big deal but hid it from doctors anyways. If you are an NFL fan defending this behavior in any way possible, you are a scumbag. I... Read More

When then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said he would pursue Bin Laden into Pakistan with or without the assistance of the Pakistani government, conservatives (and some Democrats, to be honest) lost it. How could he! Sean Hannity cried crocodile tears about Obama promising to “invade an ally” like Pakistan, while Rush Limbaugh fretted that Obama was... Read More

In the waning days of the 2012 election, liberals were confused that the Romney campaign, particularly Paul Ryan, could make the argument with a straight face to seniors in swing states like Florida that Democrats endangered the safety net programs they relied on. How could he do this, we asked ourselves. The infamous “Ryan Roadmap”... Read More

So what is a startup company? Startup company. Today this word is popular than ever. But what does it mean? Some use it to define any business and some use it to define IT projects exclusively. Based on that ambiguity we will try to make out and answer the key question of this article – [&hellip

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27 March 2014 – In a vote that reaffirmed Ukraine’s unity and territorial integrity, the United Nations General Assembly today adopted a measure underscoring that the mid-March referendum in Crimea that led to the peninsula’s annexation by Russia “has no validity” and that the parties should “pursue immediately a peaceful resolution of the situation.” By [&hellip

People included in the new US list of Russian citizens can split into four groups: representatives of the President’s Administration, Heads of State Authorities, businessmen associated with the President Vladimir Putin and members of parliament and senators. Washington’s sanctions include freezing of assets of the above persons in the US, blocking property, ban to enter [&hellip

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1. 10 percent of the entire world population is still illiterate Unfortunately certain countries are also skewing the data upwards on this statistic. Nations such as Afghanistan only have a 28 percent literacy rate for the total population. 2. Blue whales heart is the size of a VW Beetle and that you could swim through [&hellip

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What are big data and a threat they pose In scientific and technical progress, as in all spheres of life, there is a place for vogue (let’s recall at least mass ecstasy over cybernetics in 1960s, personal computers in 1980s and fears of GMO products in the end of 1990s. One can hear about so-called [&hellip

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Events of March 3. 11:09 Russian armed forces blocked military unit А3835 in Bakhchisarai, says the local newspaper Sobytiya Kryma. 11:04 Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel in a telephone conversation with the President of the US Barack Obama noted that the Russian President Vladimir Putin has lost his link with ‘reality’ and is in ‘another [&hellip

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Hillary Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department, the New York Times reports. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Clinton's advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary's post in early 2013.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel heads to Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning to issue a high-profile warning against what he considers an ill-advised nuclear deal with Iran. In an implicit challenge to President Barack Obama, Netanyahu plans to address a joint meeting of Congress at 11 a.m. Eastern to outline his case for a tougher strategy to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and to dissect the flaws of an agreement that has been emerging from American-led negotiations.

A federal judge on Monday ruled Nebraska's ban on gay marriage unconstitutional in a decision that could allow same-sex couples to marry in the state within a week. U.S. District Judge Joseph Bataillon issued a preliminary injunction in the case brought by seven same-sex couples in the state, calling Nebraska's ban an "unabashedly gender-specific infringement of the equal rights of its citizens." The state's Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts spoke out against the decision, saying, "an activist judge should not substitute his personal political preferences for the will of the people."

Tea Party radio host Andrea Shea King argued recently that Democratic lawmakers -- and specifically members of the Congressional Black Caucus -- should be put to death by hanging if they boycotted Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Tuesday speech to Congress "Obama doesn't have to run for re-election again, a lot of these guys do," King said in a clip of her radio show that was published by Right Wing Watch on Monday. "Listen, I would like to think that these guys could pay with their lives, hanging from a noose in front of the U.S. Capitol Building. ... Because what they are doing is they are putting their own interests above that of America. And to me, that is criminal. Criminal!" King noted that "most of those members who are opting out of attending the speech are members of the Congressional Black Caucus."

Hillary Clinton and her close advisers are telling Democratic donors that she will enter the presidential race sooner than expected, likely in April, a move that would allay uncertainties within her party and allow her to rev up fundraising. Clinton aides have spoken of the earlier timetable in private meetings, according to people engaged in recent discussions about the presumed Democratic front-runner's emerging 2016 campaign. At this point in the 2008 cycle, Mrs. Clinton already was a candidate. "If I were taking this on, seeing what candidates went through last time around, I

The official painting of President Bill Clinton that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery includes a nod to Monica Lewinsky's blue dress, the artist revealed in an interview with the Philadelphia Daily News. "If you look at the left-hand side of it there's a mantle in the Oval Office and I put a shadow coming into the painting and it does two things. It actually literally represents a shadow from a blue dress that I had on a mannequin, that I had there while I was painting it, but not when he was there," painter Nelson Shanks said. He claimed that Bill and Hillary Clinton now know the symbolism is there. "And so the Clintons hate the portrait," he said.

When last we left our totally trepid band of zombie slayers, Grimes Gang had arrived at Aarontown, and were fixing to enter and find out what was really behind those walls.

If the past ONE MILLION EPISODES were about how surviving the zombiepocalypse changes you man, this week's episode was about how surviving the zombiepocalypse on the road changes you and also about how surviving the zombiepocalypse inside walls doesn't change you enough. Or something.

So Grimes Gang enters Aarontown, and they are asked to surrender their weapons, which, after talking to Aarontown's leader, Deanna, they do reluctantly and suspiciously. Reluctant and suspicious are the themes of the day.

Grimes is the first to speak with Deanna, who videotapes their conversation because they believe in "transparency," and also because cutting away to the video ...

To be perfectly blunt, I've barely been paying attention to the controversy surrounding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking to the US Congress, because I can only care about so many things, and that just didn't make the cut. But this BBC story pretty much sums it up for me: "The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that Iran poses a 'threat to the entire world', in a contentious speech to the US Congress. He said the deal being negotiated between Iran and world powers 'paves Iran's path to the [nuclear] bomb'. He acknowledged that his speech was controversial and insisted that he was not meddling in internal US politics." Hahaha well if he insisted, then it must be true!

In other nuke news: "North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Su Yong said on Tuesday that his country had ...

On Sunday, Los Angeles police officers shot and killed a homeless man known as Africa on the city's infamous Skid Row:Five officers grappled on a pavement with a man known as Africa before shooting him five times in front of horrified onlookers.

The victim, whose full name has not been made public, was pronounced dead shortly after the encounter, which unfolded just before midday in skid row, a neighbourhood of homeless people and shelters close to the financial district.

...A report of an altercation between two people near East Sixth Street and South San Pedro at 11.36am prompted officers to the scene, said Jack Richter, an LAPD spokesman.

...People at the scene and on social media expressed shock that a scuffle on a busy street in broad daylight ended with lethal force, putting police violence under renewed scrutiny in the ...

So, there was a big story in the New York Times yesterday reporting how Hillary Clinton "exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials' correspondence be retained as part of the agency's record."Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton's advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the ...

"I never play the gender card…The moment you play into that, it's an issue," Mayer told Medium for an article centered on Yahoo's two-decade legacy and Mayer's hand in turning the company around. "In technology we live at a rare, fast-moving pace. There are probably industries where gender is more of an issue, but our industry is not one where I think that's relevant."Okay, player.

There are all kinds of studies and surveys and reports that utterly contradict what Mayer is saying, that gender is, in fact, "an issue" in the tech industry—especially viewed through an intersectional lens that reveals the lack of equitable opportunities for women of color and women with disabilities.

For those oh-some-pleasant holiday discussions about the latest political controversies, here's a little reference aid for one of them, The Gun Glossary: What’s a semi-automatic? What counts as an assault weapon? by Mark Joseph Stern Slate 12/17/2012.

One of my Facebook friends and one his commenters like the idea of armed guards in schools because it makes kids "feel good" to see them. It makes six-year-olds "feel good" to see a guy in a Santa Claus suit, too. But if you're an NRA True Believer, nothing is too silly an argument to repeat. As long as it changes the topic from enacting and enforcing sane gun laws. Putting armed guards in the schools - like they had at Columbine - isn't going to prevent or even much mitigate mass shootings as long as automatic and semiautomatic assault weapons are easily available with enormous clips and no ...

Somehow I listened to the presentation on Friday by the NRA's Wayne LaPierre without gaq reflexes kicking in. If you want to try it yourself, here's the whole thing, courtesy of PBS Newshour, NRA's Wayne LaPierre Calls for Armed Security in Every School 12/21/2012:

LaPierre proposes armed security guards at every school as an excuse not to have any restrictions at all on the manufacture and sale of the kinds of weapons that were not so long ago banned as "assault weapons". But this week's Facebook setting don't seem to allow it.

German cartoonist Klaus Stuttmann has a drawing (12/17/2012) of what LaPierre's ideal of a public school would be, captioned "the next thing".

Also, the Christian homeschool lobby would love to have public schools looking like this to market against. I wonder how many Christian homeschooling arrangements, which sometimes ...

"And frankly, I’m convinced that the president is unwilling to stand up to his own party on the big issues that face our country." - House Speaker John Boehner (Sabrina Siddiqui, John Boehner To Obama On Fiscal Cliff: Act On Plan B Or Get 'Serious' Huffington Post 12/20/2012

Yanis Varoufakis describes the experience of the eurozone with austerity policies, in the context of describing why the non-financial sector may not recover as fast as the financial sector (Will the real economy rebound, following Wall Street’s resuscitation? And what of Europe? – Interviewed by El Confidencial 12/20/2012):

Rapid, unregulated growth is usually built on the back of a financial sector bubble; also known as irrational exuberance. Credit expands fast, increasingly risky bets are placed and a portion of this is channelled into productive investments in industry (the real economy, as you put it). Then the bubble bursts, liquidity disappears and the real economy entered a vicious cycle, of having to pay back unsustainable debts through austerity that causes investment to plummet, debt-to-income ratios to remain prohibitively high and, alas, growth to turn increasingly negative. In this sense, the answer to your question is bleak: No, there is ...

I've resisted trying to speculate about some of the more subjective aspects of gun violence in the US political culture because of the very reason Charlie Pierce mentions in his The Night Before The President Came To Newtown Esquire Politics Blog 12/17/2012: "One pastor got on TV and blamed "the evil in the heart of man." (Unless you adopt his particular interpretation of monotheism, there is something inherent in you that might put seven bullets into a seven-year old.) This is convenient, because this is something against which we cannot legislate." (my emphasis)

A lot of the pet theories that Christian fundamentalists in particular like to throw out there on these all-too-frequent occasions of mass gun massacres are just that: a cover for the gun lobby to focus people's attention on anything and everything but better gun regulations.

So President and Social Security opponent Obama has gone there. After he let people hope for a weekend that the Grand Bargaining to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid might at least be on hold until January, on Monday comes the news that he's agreed with House Speaker John Boehner on a "fiscal cliff" plan. (Jonathan Weisman, Obama's New Offer on Fiscal Crisis Could Lead to Deal New York Times 12/17/2012)

The details are overshadowed by the only thing in it that really matters: cuts to Social Security benefits, including current recipients, by adopting the "chained CPI" inflation-adjustment measure. There are various places to find explanations of "chained CPI," e.g., David Dayen, What Chained CPI Means, and Why a Cut in a Time of Inadequate Social Security Benefits Makes No Sense FDL News 12/17/2012; Mide Konczal, A Cost of Living Adjustment ...

While white "sovereign citizens" are considered to be as much of a threat as Muslim extremists, Eric Bolling steadfastly denies that right wing, non Muslim Americans commit acts of domestic terrorism. And when they do engage in ideologically based violence, such as killing abortion providers, Bolling says they are just lone crazies.

“Great American” Sean Hannity didn’t just side with Israel over his own country as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has figuratively spit in President Obama's face. No, Hannity went out of his way to demonize Obama in every possible way he could work into a nearly 10-minute segment.

Chris Wallace gave Rep. Steve Scalise quite the grilling about the House Republicans’ DHS stunt. But before you get too excited about Wallace’s real fairness and balance, consider how Wallace let Scalise skate on questions about his speech to a white supremacist group.

Mother Jones has obtained a copy of Bill O’Reilly’s CBS News video from the Falklands war riot in Buenos Aires – the one that he has since claimed included deaths, “real bullets” and an injury to his cameraman. Yet O’Reilly’s own report includes none of that.

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